Social Action & Science

Being With DyingThis Professional Training Program for Clinicians in Compassionate Care of the Seriously Ill and Dying is fostering a revolution in care of the dying and seriously ill. Clinicians learn essential tools for taking care of dying people with skill and compassion.

ChaplaincyA visionary and comprehensive two-year program for a new kind of chaplaincy to serve individuals, communities, the environment, and the world.

More about the instructors:

Acharya Fleet Maull, M.A., Ph.D. candidate, is an author, meditation teacher, management consultant, end of life care educator and social activist working for peace, prison reform and social transformation. Acharya Maull is a senior teacher (Acharya) appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in the Shambhala Buddhist Community. He was a senior student of the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, serving the Vidyahdara as a personal attendant for many years. He is currently a senior student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. Fleet teaches many programs throughout the international Shambhala Buddhist Community including the Shambhala Path of Social Engagement.

Fleet is also a Dharma successor of Zen master and social entrepreneur, Roshi Bernie Glassman, and a fully empowered teacher or Sensei and senior priest in the Zen Peacemaker Sangha and the Soto Zen lineage of Maezumi Roshi. Fleet completed his senior priest ordination with Roshis Joan Halifax and Pat Enkyo O’hara. As a Zen peacemaker, Fleet serves as a spirit holder of the annual Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and leads bearing witness and street retreats throughout the world.

Fleet founded both Prison Dharma Network and National Prison Hospice Association while serving a 14-year mandatory-minimum sentence on drug charges in federal prison from 1985 to 1999. Fleet helped start the first hospice program inside an American prison, initiating a prison hospice movement that now includes over 70 hospice programs in U.S. state and federal prisons. He also led a twice weekly meditation group at the prison for 14 years. Prison Dharma Network now includes over 150 organizations and over 2500 individual members working to bring meditation and transformation to the lives of prisoners and correctional workers throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Fleet served on the Naropa University faculty from 1995 to 2009, where he taught courses in psychology, meditation, socially engaged Buddhism, and contemplative and integral approaches to social action, peacemaking, and political science. He founded the Center for Contemplative End of Life Care Programs at Naropa University and serves as senior faculty with the Upaya Institute’s Being with Dying program and as co-director of the Upaya Institute’s Chaplaincy Training Program.

Fleet also founded and directs Peacemaker Institute, a leading provider of integral and transformative leadership training for nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, community activists, and peacemakers. The Peacemaker Institute also hosts bearing witness retreats and street retreats in places of deep suffering throughout the world.

Fleet leads meditation retreats, leadership and activist trainings, bearing witness retreats and street retreats throughout the North America, Europe, Africa and Latin America, where he also visits prisons and jails doing transformational work with both prisoners and prison staff. He is a frequent presenter at conferences on prison work, end of life care, peacemaking and socially engaged spirituality. His peacemaking activities range from the streets of U.S. cities, to former concentration camps in Poland, to Rwanda and Israel-Palestine, and the forgotten world inside our jails and prisons. Fleet is the author of Dharma in Hell, the Prison Writings of Fleet Maull and numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of corrections and end of life care. He has been interviewed widely in the print, radio, and television media, including National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program and the nationally syndicated E-Town.